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The Black War
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The Black War
A colony nearly wiped out a people in a decade, then told itself the people had simply been 'doomed' to vanish — a race dying by nature, not by settlers' hands. The extinction was neither natural nor, in the end, complete.
British colonization brought Aboriginal Tasmanians to the edge of destruction within a decade through frontier killing, dispossession, and forced removal — and colonial society licensed and then erased the catastrophe with the doctrine of a 'doomed race,' recasting a man-made near-annihilation as a natural extinction.
The doctrine was a lie twice over: the deaths were not natural, and the extinction never happened.
The Black War brought Aboriginal Tasmanians to the edge of destruction in a decade.
As settlement expanded in the 1820s the Tasmanian frontier became a killing ground. The Black War, largely guerrilla conflict, left an estimated 600–900 Aboriginal Tasmanians and 200+ colonists dead. Because the Aboriginal population was small, that toll — with introduced disease, lost hunting grounds, and the abduction of women — shattered the island's Indigenous society within roughly a decade. The scale of the collapse, not just the number killed, makes Tasmania one of the starkest cases of colonial near-annihilation.
The dehumanizing doctrine was the 'doomed race' — extinction recast as nature.
The idea that licensed the crime was the 'doomed race' theory: colonial and later scientific opinion held Aboriginal Tasmanians were a primitive people fated to die out before a superior civilization — natural law, not policy. It eased the conscience of a society watching a people destroyed, reframing killing and dispossession as inevitable fading, and turned survivors into living relics for scientific curiosity. Dehumanization as the denial of agency and futurity: a whole people declared already as good as gone.
The state tried to sweep them from the land: the 'Black Line' (1830), then removal to Flinders Island.
In Oct–Nov 1830 Governor George Arthur mobilized the 'Black Line' — ~2,200 soldiers, settlers, and convicts marched across the settled districts to drive the remaining Aboriginal people off the farmland. Militarily near-farcical (it captured almost no one), but damning as intent: an entire colony organized a human chain to clear a people from the land. What force failed to do, George Augustus Robinson's 'Friendly Mission' accomplished by persuasion — relocating most survivors to Wybalenna on Flinders Island, where the majority died of disease and despair. Benevolence as the last stage of destruction.
The 'extinction' was a myth — Tasmanian Aboriginal people survive today.
We grade a widely believed claim false because it is, and because the myth is part of the harm. When Truganini died in 1876, colonial society declared her 'the last Tasmanian Aboriginal' and extinction became received wisdom for a century. Not true: the Palawa survive today, largely through the descendants of Aboriginal women and Bass Strait sealers. The 'extinction' story was the 'doomed race' doctrine's final chapter and did real damage — used to deny recognition, land, and identity well into the twentieth century. We correct it plainly: they are still here.
Whether it was 'genocide' is debated among historians; the near-destruction of a people is not.
The doctrine that turned a crime into a fate.
Tasmania shows the method in an especially insidious form: the doctrine didn't just license the crime, it disappeared it. The 'doomed race' theory reclassified a man-made near-annihilation as a natural event — nobody's fault, nothing to answer for — a more total erasure than any cover-up. It's the settler-colonial logic of the Doctrine of Discovery carried to its endpoint, and the near-twin of the Stolen Generations on the mainland. And the last claim matters most: the people declared extinct are still here. Correcting that myth isn't a footnote — it's the refutation of the whole doctrine.
Help us fill these lines.
- OpenThe extinction myth is graded FALSE/MISLEADING — the Palawa survive today; 'last of her race' is itself part of the dehumanization. Population figures fenced (pre-contact estimates vary widely; killing toll given as a ~600–900 range).
- Open'Genocide' is carried, not asserted (SOME SMOKE) — many historians apply it to Tasmania, some resist. The 'doomed race' doctrine comes from the colonists' and the era's own discourse, not our gloss.